Kurzweil: Robots Will Surpass Humans by 2029

[Jude Iam]

https://www.coasttocoastam.com/artic...humans-by-2029

hmmm, looks like this is what's coming up. stick around and find out. jude

[Star Man]

https://www.coasttocoastam.com/artic...humans-by-2029

hmmm, looks like this is what's coming up. stick around and find out. jude

Cyborgs, which are a rudimentary form of robot, already have surpassed humans. What Kurzweill is saying is that autonomous robots will surpass humans. The sad thing about Homo imprudens is that when we read "robots will surpass humans by 2029" we think "Well, fine then, we're safe for 15 years."
Cyborgs are common in our world. A cyborg is an entity that is part human and part machine. We think of Robocop when we think of a cyborg. However, you and your automobile comprise a cyborg. The International Space Station is a cyborg. No man landed on the moon, but a cyborg did land on the moon. I am communicating at this moment in cyborg form. If I were to say these words to you in person, it would be human to human communication, but the insertion of several machines, the computer I am typing on, the internet that carries the signal, and the computer that assembles the signal into the Waccobb web site, comprise a cyborg, a cyborg that is distributed in physical space.
No human can drill deep into the earth and pump crude oil up to the surface, but a cyborg can. No human can pollute the atmosphere with oxides of nitrogen and particulates, but the manufacturing cyborgs can and do. No human can fling a projectile at 3,900 feet per second but a modern rifle cyborg with high performance cartridges like the .220 Swift or .204 Ruger can do it.
Cyborgs, a form of robot, have already surpassed humans and have drastically changed the environment in ways that select against humans and for cyborgs and eventually autonomous robots.

Star Man

[Valley Oak]

I think the topic of the future of robotics and its impact on civilization is fascinating. I especially like Asimov's science fiction masterpieces on the subject, such as "I Robot" and many others. It was one of Asimov's favorite subjects to research and write about.

I tried on more than one occasion to click on the object provided in the website, after I clicked on the URL that you provided but I have not had any luck. You might want to check the link or provide another source. Also, the rest of the website seems to have some questionable material that you might want to scrutinize.

https://www.coasttocoastam.com/artic...humans-by-2029

hmmm, looks like this is what's coming up. stick around and find out. jude

[Hotspring 44]

Some more informative links:
https://www.wired.com/2009/12/blio-ray-kurzweil-book/


https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...80642063,d.cGU


https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...80642063,d.cGU

I tried on more than one occasion to click on the object provided in the website, after I clicked on the URL that you provided but I have not had any luck. You might want to check the link or provide another source.

[podfish]

I especially like Asimov's science fiction masterpieces on the subject, such as "I Robot" and many others. It was one of Asimov's favorite subjects to research and write about.

the humanoid-ish robots are the ones people get most excited about. But they're rare and limited. They'll be the most directly visible and when used to replace retail workers will get the most attention. I don't think we yet really intuitively grasp how immense the proliferation of robots is becoming.

But of course robots are really just mobile computers; for most workers in the modern economy their mobility isn't all that important (think desk workers...). We're already well on our way to a robot-driven civilization, where most people's economic contributions aren't really all that important. I don't hear enough discussion focused on that aspect - why we as a society think that an individual's economic value is so important that the adjective is almost unnecessary. Maybe not so much when thinking of family and friends, but in larger contexts it's a given that the economic factors trump humanitarian ones. Many people already see that it's inhumane to make access to health care a function of an individual's economic situation. Why not go farther and extend that to food and lodging? The robot overlords may not have the same Puritan work ethic - or rather, they may embody it themselves while refusing to rquire it of their human neighbors. There really is no reason that robots need to be ambitious, or judgemental, or selfish. Maybe those are all evolutionary artifacts - they emerge from the systems that drive the animal behaviors needed to find food and compete for resources. Robots can be designed to pursue goals and policies without bothering to embed a motivation; I.D. disciples may not agree, but our motivations are arise because our biology is evolved instead of designed.

A lot of A.I. these days is actually being developed using evolutionary principles, because intelligent design is so hard. This is what worries Kurzweil and also Musk - and was foreseen by Asimov. In I-Robot, a robot who's given a goal to preserve itself has to balance that goal vs. causing harm to a human. In the near future, Google cars will need to deal with that - should it crash into a school bus to avoid hitting a pedestrian?? Would a robot/AI system charged with making the electrical grid work at its highest efficiency suddenly decide that it could improve that efficiency by limiting the human population, or shutting down heating in the north since people can move south? Personally, I think that's our tendency to anthropomorphize going too far. We impute human motives into animals; we need not impute 'motives' into AI decision making. Let's hope I'm not wrong!! else here comes the world that will unleash the Terminator....

[Valley Oak]

.
Amazon Releasing 15,000 Robots In Its Warehouses

the humanoid-ish robots are the ones people get most excited about. But they're rare and limited. They'll be the most directly visible and when used to replace retail workers will get the most attention. I don't think we yet really intuitively grasp how immense the proliferation of robots is becoming...

[Hotspring 44]

Another example of what could be is in the introduction of the movie Dune; About 1 minute into the introduction is a short clip explaining about the “robots”.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7FcJwg6OkA

[Gene]

Stephen Hawking warns artificial intelligence could end mankind

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30290540

[Valley Oak]

I just saw a movie called, "Automata," where this point is the central theme!

The movie itself is so-so but if you watch it with this idea in mind then it is interesting. It is worth watching from a science fiction (fact?) perspective. In any case, it is a fascinating topic of discussion regarding the rapid advance of cyborg(?) technology, how it is going to massively impact the future of civilization, and individual lifestyles. Isaac Asimov's fiction classics are very relevant and necessary reads, especially for a thorough reflection on the future of robotics. Asimov's 3 laws of robotics:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

However, in the movie, "Automata," there are only 2 "protocols" of robotics:

1. Prevents the robot from harming any form of life.
2. Prevents the robot from altering itself or other robots.

It provides for an interesting twist to the logic of the movie and a departure from Asimov's "lock" on robotic rules.

Stephen Hawking warns artificial intelligence could end mankind


https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30290540

[Dan Gurney]

Interesting thread. The Guardian article on Ray Kurzweil is worth reading.

With the exception of sci-fi community, we underestimate the rate of technological change. We also can fail to grasp the unwanted implications of technological development.

Here's a video called "Humans Need Not Apply" about how robotics may soon replace your job—whether you're a driver, a white collar worker, a professional, or even an artist.

Here's a link to the video on Youtube:

https://youtu.be/7Pq-S557XQU

[Valley Oak]

.
Unless I've overlooked something, this thread has explored, so far, two major points:

1. Technological Singularity
2. Technological Unemployment

Regarding Technological Singularity, I'm really skeptical, despite what my hero, Stephen Hawking says.

You could easily see the historical evolution of our civilization's fears regarding the human creator being challenged in some way by its creation. For example, you can look at Arthur C. Clarke's novel and the movie based on it, "2001 Space Odyssey," and see the supercomputer, "HAL," killing all of the astronauts in the spaceship, except for the last one, the protagonist, who defeats the evil machine as the movie climaxes towards the end.

There is another famous literary example in the novel, "Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus," by Mary Shelley, 1818, where the creator, Dr. Victor Frankenstein, is killed by his creation or monster.

If you go back further in Western Civilization's cultural history, we will see in Greco-Roman mythology the story of how the god, Cronus, would devour his children to insure that none of them would ever overthrow him. That did not work well for him in the end, however, because Zeus eventually killed his father anyway.

When we use Jacques Derrida's "deconstructionism," we are able to peel away the logical layers and foundations of our cultural onion and see the factors of our thinking today, whether it is philosophy, religion, traditions, morality, our heritage, language, sex, politics, and so on.

It is often as simple as the basic natural cycle of the "old" fearing the "new" or the old being replaced by the new. Hegel and Marx both posited that this is an inevitable process of reality. Hegel asserted the simple mechanism of: thesis > antithesis > synthesis.

Thesis in Hegel's model can, for example, represent the status quo (government, religion, tradition, mainstream culture, etc). Antithesis is the new or the argument against the establishment. If a young couple is in love, despite their parents' having arranged a marriage for each of them with other people, then the children's resistance and their rebellion is the antithesis or anti-thesis (against the tradition of arranged marriages). If the arranged marriage wins out, then thesis is conserved (hence, conservatism and social retardation and ignorance are successfully maintained). If the children's choices (their true loves) for marriage partners become their spouses or, some compromise is reached, then synthesis is the product and the "new" has prevailed.

Hetero marriage was the thesis, gay marriage is the antithesis, legalization of gay marriage (or its institutionalization) is the synthesis.

It seems that fear of the unknown or of what is new, is a natural human response. Also, people don't want to change because they are perfectly happy (or they believe that they are) with things just the way they are. Both of these attitudes are based on ignorance. The fear comes naturally because folks don't know any better. They don't understand new developments and, naturally, mistrust or even violently attack the challenge of what is new.

Hence, fear of Technological Singularity, Artificial Intelligence, and future robots enslaving or exterminating humans, could be just that, fear and ignorance.

Regarding Technological Unemployment, I also disagree with this fear. Yes, the transition to a society where machines, computers, AI, and robots will eliminate the need for most human labor, especially physical labor, will be a very rocky and destabilizing process; it will be revolutionary. But we don't have a choice because reality is upon us and we will deal with it poorly or less poorly. But we are going to have to deal with the restructuring of our civilization and culture whether we like it or not. That's just the way things are and always have been. The only thing that we can be certain of is that change will always come, sooner or later, and at every level and scope.

[podfish]

Hence, fear of Technological Singularity, Artificial Intelligence, and future robots enslaving or exterminating humans, could be just that, fear and ignorance.

Regarding Technological Unemployment, I also disagree with this fear.

could be just that. But could be the correct response (not the ignorance part - you know what I mean).

But there's really no way to know how to bet, when talking about AI's behavior toward sentient meat. The current level of AI displays only limited agency, and the scariest scenarios are those where the AI has the ability to actually set its own agenda. Now, AIs at best choose tactics, not strategy.

And as for unemployment - history isn't much comfort, certainly not to anyone who lives in only a short span of it. As the cliche goes, in the long run we're all dead anyway. In the short run, destruction of jobs will deprive large numbers of people from full access to the productivity created by non-humans. We've got several decades of examples to see that the economic gains created by automation aren't returned to the workers. Socialism, which has such a sterling reputation in this country, is the only form of government that devalues the importance of "ownership". We're not going to get a socialist utopia here, so any mechanism of distributing created wealth beyond a tiny few will be slow in arriving. We have no way of dealing with the immense leveraging that technology gives to people like Zuckerberg. We've been trained to instinctively believe he's earned his immense wealth because he was (one of the) initial forces behind a multi-billion dollar enterprise that wouldn't otherwise exist - although of course if he hadn't done it, someone else would have and once he'd done it, it was extremely difficult for someone else to duplicate. A lot of new wealth will be like that; you need to be pretty good to play, but the winners are somewhat randomly chosen from that group. Of course, you won't get the winners to agree to that representation!

[Hotspring 44]

...But we are going to have to deal with the restructuring of our civilization and culture whether we like it or not. That's just the way things are and always have been. The only thing that we can be certain of is that change will always come, sooner or later, and at every level and scope.

Edward, you are describing one of what could be infinite number of ways to describe the universal "law" (the "Paradox Constant" is what I named it). it, as best and minimized wording as I can come up with to describe it anyway (is):

"The only absolute constant is continuous change"

.
FWIW, I think I am the first one to say that exact 7 word phrase... ...and also name it.

[Hotspring 44]

An interesting YouTube Video titled: “In response to Humans Need Not Apply”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggN8wCWSIx4

Here's a video called "Humans Need Not Apply" about how robotics may soon replace your job—whether you're a driver, a white collar worker, a professional, or even an artist.

[sharingwisdom]

This Is A Tipping Point: Robots “Cheaper Than Any Human Worker” Means The End Of Jobs

https://www.activistpost.com/2015/10...d-of-jobs.html

"South Korea is making a huge move to undercut China on labor costs by displacing humans once and for all in their production facilities, in a bid to edge up on their Asian rival. Samsung has vowed to createrobots that do the work automatically, and without the need for breaks, meals, or days off that are literally “cheaper than any human worker.”

This is the tipping point. Things will not get better from here without a great and painful struggle."

What do you think?

[Hotspring 44]

There was a thread on this topic called “Kurzweil: Robots Will Surpass Humans by 2029”

To answer your question about what I think: https://www.waccobb.net/forums/showt...937#post185937

I suggest you may want to check out the thread “ Kurzweil: Robots Will Surpass Humans by 2029”

This Is A Tipping Point: Robots “Cheaper Than Any Human Worker” Means The End Of Jobs...

[comodin]

About 50 years ago, I read a comment by Bertrand Russell. He noted that industrialization was touted as the beginning of a human paradise, where the machines would do increasing proportions of work and we could enjoy hugely increased leisure and time for creativity. Yet, though we do all have refrigerators, we seem to be more enslaved than ever.

It seems sensible and desirable to have machines doing the heavy lifting and all the routine, soul-destroying jobs, and this is the way it could go. But that would require intelligent and benign implementation, and from what we have seen so far, it seems that enslavement has somehow triumphed.

I wonder what the Korean workers, replaced by machines, will do with their new leisure time?

This Is A Tipping Point: Robots “Cheaper Than Any Human Worker” Means The End Of Jobs

https://www.activistpost.com/2015/10...d-of-jobs.html

[podfish]

...
This is the tipping point. Things will not get better from here without a great and painful struggle.

struggle for what? that's the key question. Like global warming, it's coming whether it's ignored or not. We could go for the original French method of attacking them with shoes. The tipping point isn't here yet. Actually there is no "tipping point" - tipping from what to what? The core and usually unquestioned assumptions underlying western thinking - individualism is good, the ability and interest in hard work is tied to human worth, you have to earn food/water/survival by your actions, you're more worthy if you have something of economic value to offer, you've 'earned' what you have - those won't really cut it when the robot overlords are here. Or for that matter, when the robot road-bosses are here.

So do you plan to struggle to keep robots out of the world, or return to a more primitive/pastoral world, or what? To me, the only hope is that there really is enough good will in the world so that the benefits of the robot army aren't flowing strictly to the robot army owners. And it's not impossible. People of immense wealth like Andrew Carnegie spent a ton of it to improve the well-being of their societies. Bill Gates does the same. Even having to write the words 'immense wealth' is annoying - really what they have is immense influence. "Wealth" implies a zero-sum game, where some have resources that come at the expense of others. Now, however, many things don't have a value that serves as a means of allocation (there's no scarcity, so no inherent "market value"). Not just MP3 files, but all software is free to duplicate. The next level, adding robots, means that physical objects share some of that (of course, there's the ecological impact - which can't be ignored but can be managed). We care about artist's rights to their music because they need -something- to trade for food/shelter. That's a historical artifact, and if we're lucky it will be yet another bit of debris in the dustbin of history. 'course, people whose moral code is so tightly bound to the values of individualism and the idea that you can measure relative human worth find this repugnant. Also, those who would blow up Roman ruins because they represent deviance from a lifestyle divinely ordered. They may bugger it for the rest of us.

[Shandi]

What can we do when jobs are "out-sourced", eliminated, or given to robots? Most people work in order to eat and have shelter, so they will try to find another way to earn their living. Some may start a business, some may find other jobs, many will become severely depressed and hopeless if they have no skills to offer besides whatever they did on a production line. Although, it can be an opportunity to be creative, for most it may be seen only as a crisis, and not "leisure time". Have many of us viewed losing a job as way to enjoy leisure time?

[Mindful Negotiator]

Here is a powerful, detached, academic, and disturbing 15 minute video describing where we are headed. Humans Need Not Apply. It posits that universal automation is inevitable; it is a plea for us to start thinking now about the implications of the coming mass-scale unemployability of our species. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

What can we do when jobs are "out-sourced", eliminated, or given to robots? Most people work in order to eat and have shelter, so they will try to find another way to earn their living. Some may start a business, some may find other jobs, many will become severely depressed and hopeless if they have no skills to offer besides whatever they did on a production line. Although, it can be an opportunity to be creative, for most it may be seen only as a crisis, and not "leisure time". Have many of us viewed losing a job as way to enjoy leisure time?

[Shandi]

A reminder that most of us are replaceable by robots. One of the things I think has great value is the ability to sort through massive amounts of data to arrive at conclusions on the best way to proceed. Think doctors, lawyers, stock brokers, etc.

If we're a creative person in the arts, such as a artist, photographer or musician, we believe that we are so unique that no one could duplicate our work. Watch this video, to see just how creative robots can be.

It's mind boggling to imagine that humans will no longer be needed to organize, develop, create, destroy, or solve problems. Imagine that your job and your "to do" list will now be done by a robot. If your survival needs are based on receiving an income from working, how will you survive now? Maybe this will be the biggest influence on depopulation, especially by those who are already barely surviving. Maybe the 1% will rule the robots, and really control the planet even more than they do now.

This makes me glad that at my age, I'm on the way to another world, sooner than I know.

Here is a powerful, detached, academic, and disturbing 15 minute video describing where we are headed...